This article in The Advocate came across my news stream the other day…

Calls to for the vice mayor of Dixon, Calif., to step down hit a fever pitch over the weekend following a post to his blog in which he called for Straight Pride American Month, or “SPAM” as he unironically called it. In his wildly homophobic post, Dixon Vice Mayor Ted Hickman gleefully clung to the differences between straight and gay people, referring to LGBT people as “tinker bells,” “fairies,” and men in “skin tight short-shorts and go-go boots.” 

You say men in skin tight short-shorts and go-go boots like it’s a bad thing Ted…  So I thought I should sketch that to see if he’s right about the wrongness of it all…

Well I certainly don’t see anything wrong with that Ted. You must be confused. 

Some months ago on the advice of Rick Worley, he of “A Waste of Time” comics, I splurged on an iPad Pro 12.9 specifically so I could use it to sketch on, and maybe get some episodes of A Coming Out Story done with it. What I discovered is drawing on a glass surface is different enough from drawing on paper that initially I was struggling so badly with it just to get anything decent out of me I just kept walking away from it. Adding to the struggle was the iOS interface model is to have no or very few actual menus, but instead use stylus or finger gestures and taps to access different functions, and it kept making me break concentration on what I was drawing to go on an Easter egg hunt for some function I needed just then…like how the hell do you Undo!?

So the iPad quickly fell into disuse. Which itself was a source of stress since I’d paid so much for it. I’d bought the version with cellular data functionality because I wanted to travel with it and I didn’t want to have to depend on WiFi hubs, some of which could be letting hackers into your computer. I bought the version with the least amount of memory on the basis that I’d store my sketches in one of the cloud services and it was still about a thousand bucks, plus another 250 for the Apple Pencil (to draw on it with) and a leather sleeve for it that had a holder for the pencil. All told with the Apple Care and taxes it was close to 1500 bucks and for that money I needed to be using it. The problem was how to motivate myself into learning to draw on glass, and getting familiar with a new user interface.

So…thanks Ted!